07 February 2011

7. RANDOM NOTES ON ROBIN WOOD

"If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be Rio Bravo":Robin Wood "If I were asked to choose a critic that would justify the existence of film criticism, it would certainly be Robin Wood": Hollywood

22 August 2011

John Lavery, Jack Layton, Paul Quarrington, Robin Wood, Barbara Caruso — there are people who aren't family but whose deaths are really hard to accept. Just doesn't seem real.

MOVIE & CINEACTION (June 2011)

The resuscitated Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism issue no. 2 carries a tribute to Robin Wood and reprints some of his harder-to-find articles: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/movie (see sidebar).

Almost simultaneously CineAction issue no. 84 has now appeared on the stands with its own tribute to Robin, one of the founding members of the CineAction collective: http://cineaction.ca.

PIERS HANDLING ON ROBIN WOOD

Saturday 04 June 2011 Toronto Star page GT3

Upon being interviewed before receiving an honourary degree from the University of Toronto about what inspired him in his career, Piers Handling stated:

“I was studying history at Queen’s, but they had the first film department in the country and I quickly fell into their embrace, getting to know the two film profs, Peter Harcourt and Robin Wood, really well. It was an exciting time as Robin was acknowledged as one of the leading film critics in the world at the time. He brought Arthur Penn to Kingston, shortly after Bonnie and Clyde, and I was invited along with a small group of students to an evening at Robin’s house.

Robin Wood & David Elliott (1972)

Rubbing shoulders with a major filmmaker and realizing that the critical world of a university could rub shoulders with the practical world of filmmaking was an exhilarating moment.”

DAVID ELLIOTT ON ARTHUR PENN

David Elliott tells the story of Arthur Penn visiting Kingston in 1970. David, Robin, and Arthur Penn went to a local theatre for a showing of Little Big Man. At the point at which Custer killed Jack Crabb's (Dustin Hoffman's) wife, Sunshine, someone in the audience shouted out, "You bastard!" Arthur Penn gleefully turned to Robin and exclaimed, "That's exactly the response I was aiming for."

GREGG ARAKI ON ROBIN WOOD

[posted by Thom Ernst to Toro Magazine 08 April 2011]

My first introduction to your films was The Living End (1992). I was fascinated by the tagline: "An irresponsible movie by Gregg Araki."

It was actually kind of a tongue-in-cheek tagline. A lot of my movies have that tongue-in-cheek tagline at the beginning. It's funny too because in a way it's related to Toronto. I’m an old-school film student, very much like Smith in Kaboom. I studied film as undergraduate in college. And it was in reference to an essay actually by Robin Wood who is a famous film critic and actually based out of Toronto.

And recently died.

Yes and recently passed away. He wrote an article about (Howard) Hawks’s Bringing up Baby which is my all-time favourite movie. It had a real influence on me, and an influence on the Living End as well. The stories really relate to each other. I actually met Robin Wood at the screening of Living End in Toronto and I told him that and he was so excited and flattered that it was his article that made it into my movie. So it came full circle there.

1 comment:

The thing that impressed me most about Robin Wood, aside from his obviously exceptional intelligence and insight, was his integrity – mainly in the root sense of wholeness: the life and the writing were indivisible – and steadfastness in the face of opposition. The writers I admire most – for example, Tolstoy and Kafka, amongst othyers – share this characteristic, this unrelenting exploration at the deepest levels of – well, of what differs from writer to writer, but in the instances I have invoked, of at the very least how to live a fully human life in a world that appears hostile to such. Leavis, whom Wood admired, also shared this characteristic to the end of his life, but Wood never succumbed to despair (though tempted to), as the late Leavis’s crankiness suggested he did: the substance of his attack against Snow, for example, may have been warranted but the tenor of it was not. And the steadfastness is both a concomitant to and component of the integrity. Such was Robin’s integrity that it remained undimmed to the last.